CONFESSIONS

Gérard Depardieu Reveals He Was a Male Escort and Grave Robber Before Becoming an Actor

Last month, Gérard Depardieu—Oscar-nominated actor, French expat, and former VF.com folk hero—revealed, in a shocking interview, that he frequently consumes up to 14 bottles of alcohol a day. At the time, the news made us wonder what kind of demons haunt Depardieu. And in his new autobiography, That’s the Way It Was, the actor addresses just this subject.

Explaining the need for his dangerous drinking habit, Depardieu writes, “I’m obsessed with the racket in my body, the beating of my heart, the gurgling of my intestines, my joints cracking. . . . It’s become a phobia to the point that if I’m alone in a hotel, I must drink so as not to hear it, so as not to go mad from it. I can’t get to sleep unless I am dead drunk.”

Elsewhere in the memoir, which is excerpted in the Daily Mail, Depardieu describes his troubled childhood in Châteauroux, where he claims he began working as a male escort at an early age. “I’ve known since I was very young that I please homosexuals,” he writes. “I would ask them for money.”

In addition to stealing a car in his teen years—for which he went to prison—the actor claims that he also helped a man rob graves, digging up newly buried bodies and stealing jewelry and shoes from them.

“At 20, the thug in me was alive and kicking,” he continues. Still working as a male escort, he writes, “I would rip some of [my clients] off. I would beat up some bloke and leave with all his money.”

It is precisely this hardened side of Depardieu that the actor says attracted Russian president Vladimir Putin, whom he now claims as a friend. “We could have both become hoodlums. . . . I think he immediately liked my hooligan side . . . the fact that I had occasionally been picked up off the pavement dead drunk.”

Depardieu writes that his luck did not change in France until a gay theater talent spotter offered to pay for Depardieu to study drama.

That’s the Way It Was, co-authored by Lionel Duroy, is not yet available in English.